In order to begin formulating my capstone project, I am first in need of understanding WHAT it is and what a final project looks like. Here is what I gather from reading the Capstone Handbook.
I still do not have the full grasp of what a Capstone project LOOKS like. I find myself trying to envision the finished product and I can’t see it in my mind’s eyes. I’m one of those visual learners who wants to see a sample of the finished product before I begin. (Does this remind anyone of our readings these past two weeks in Dervin and Baggio?!) There must be an expectation of the finished product but I am just not understanding it.
Based on my current understanding, I think it is safest to say that my audience will be my fellow colleagues. First, it seems the Capstone project is geared toward this audience. Further, we don’t have access to our student this semester. Finally, it seems the purpose behind the capstone is to create a resource to influence others, namely, educators. As I’m progressing through the innovative learning program, I’m coming to the conclusion that Independent Studies should be leveraging digital technology for its learners to a greater degree. Our program is actually an ideal place to implement so many of the 21st century learning strategies we’ve discussed, especially digitally accessed, self-paced, flipped classrooms. I would want to consider that my audience should include my principal and people in the district in a position to allow my school site to broaden our digital tools and following from that, possibly our curriculum choices. Certain materials do not lend themselves to study from home. For example, one of the current district-adopted math programs does not do a good job of supporting learning from home. It is strongly teacher led. We need a digitally accessible program. This, of course, means someone with decision making power and money spending clout has to buy in and support this change. As an ELA teacher, I am most interested in finding a resource for my students that is accessible digitally that will foster a love for reading and further success in reading. I would ideally like to find a resource that is proven by research to be successful, especially for an at-risk and special needs population. I would like to try it with my students to assess if it could be used at my school site in the future.
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What is the opposite of a digital native? A digital immigrant? I guess that’s what I am. I didn’t really decide to move to this new country, in fact, I moved reluctantly and only adapted as was necessary. I looked fondly back on the simple days back in the old country. Sure, many tasks took longer and you had to commit more to memory, but I knew my way around it and how to get the job done with the available tools. So now, here I am, realizing that I will never be moving back to the old country - it does not even exist anymore. It’s time to learn the language, culture, and tools of my new digital home beyond just surviving and barely keeping pace. Time to become fluent. In fact - it’s far past time! So to the task at hand - to review a digital tool I’ve used in school that is not a GSuite app nor one we’ve discussed in class. Embarrassing to admit - I got nothing! Probably the most significant reason I decided to enroll in the Innovative Learning masters program was to push my own comfort zone and force myself to learn more technology tools. At this point I am still soaking in the knowledge of others and trying out the tools that have been suggested - I have not yet reached the stage where I am the innovator. For the sake of having something to contribute, I’ll review a digital learning platform introduced to me at Credit Recovery Summer School. APEX is an online learning platform used by the Adult School and now the district’s high school credit recovery program. I have four different English semesters running concurrently. Students come in every day and access their online course. The full, Common Core aligned course is available to each student. This course is prescriptive, meaning that each unit is preceeded by a pre-test. If a student can demonstrate mastery of a part of the material, that lesson is taken out of their personalized learning plan. Each student progresses self-paced through a series of readings, activities, videos, quizzes, projects, and writing prompts. As they demonstrate mastery of each part, the program opens up the next unit. Most assessment is done by the program with a couple teacher assessed parts (usually the writing) in each unit. Conceivably, a very motivated student could move through a course quickly by logging in from home. The teacher’s role from the perspective of the use of the program is to maintain the classroom dashboard: enroll students, manage the class content, monitor students’ pacing through the semester to ensure completion, unlock tests so students can only access them from a proctored environment. From the perspective of instruction in content knowledge, the teacher supports each individual student when he or she encounters difficulty. Already I’ve plopped down next to a few students to help them through difficult concepts or writing prompts. It took me 2 training sessions to feel comfortable navigating the platform - the first session was in person for 2 hours and the second was an hour long webcam training. I find the teacher platform very easy to navigate, and I am also very impressed with the content and tools given to the students in their portal. This is a very appropriate and effective tool for this job. Students have only 17 days to complete a semester and receive their credits for the course. It’s also helpful to the instructor because you can run several courses simultaneously without having to create your own lesson plans and assessments. One of the challenges the students face is staying engaged when they’re working at a computer for 3 ½ hours a day with little peer interaction. We have to take breaks often. I’ve also kept a constant circulating presence to make sure they aren’t just surfing the web and also to discuss the content of the course with individuals. As a whole, though, I am very impressed with APEX learning’s course design and online platform. Finding time to instruct digital literacy in a full curriculum is certainly challenging. The minutes in an instructional day are limited. I know all teachers face a time crunch. Here’s a snapshot of my week. I give this not to complain or use it as an excuse not to face the task of teaching digital literacy, but in the hopes that you, dear reader, might have ideas to assist me in being a better educator. Two heads are better than one… and the more, the merrier!
My possible schedule for a week could include any grade from K to 8th. Typically it is rare to have students enrolled in lower elementary, and currently, if there were students in every grade level, they would need to be paired up in multi-grade sessions because we have only two teachers for K-8. Think of me like a coordinator for a homeschool student who has the advantage of having classmates and a teacher with whom he gets to check-in every week. For the K through 5th, I teach all 4 core subjects: ELA, Social Studies, Math, and Science. For the 6th-8th I teach ELA and Social Studies. My schedule is set at 25 instruction hours per week with an extra 7 hours set aside for prep and meetings that include 1-1 student meetings, IEP meetings, parent conferencing, team meetings, a weekly meeting with the principal, and professional development on Wednesdays. Let’s take a typical Tuesday: 8-9am IEP meeting, 9-10am 7th grade ELA, 10-11am 7th grade Social Studies, 11-12pm 2nd grade Math and ELA, 12:30-1 pm one-on-one with student who was absent yesterday, 1-2pm 5th grade Social Studies and Science, 2-3pm 3rd grade Math and Science. Bear in mind that is the ONLY hour that week that the student attends that class; the rest of the learning and work is done at home through independent studies. Students receive 3 hours per week of class time. This year we expanded 8th grade to 4 hours. Our classroom is a little bit traditional and little bit flipped. During the hour a week per subject, we go through what the student studied at home to assess learning and preview and frontload the next week’s content. It is very fast paced and bare bones. The students and parents are truly in control of their own learning. So you can see that when I throw around the idea of teaching digital literacy, I will have to also think outside the box and think about putting the learning in the hands of the learner. That being said, I think the best approach is to integrate the instruction into the existing curriculum. Rather than think of digital literacy and digital citizenship as a separate lesson that needs to be taught as a stand alone lesson, or teaching technology for its own sake, I’d like to take the approach of truly integrating technology and digital use into the learning. For example, let’s take a 3rd grade learning unit where the students’ end result is to create a slide show for an animal report. In the research portion of the lesson the students would learn about efficient ways to search for online information, critical thinking skills to filter information, how to identify legitimate academic sources versus sources that are not credible sources. When the students move to writing their paragraphs and presenting information, they would learn how to cite sources and give credit to others. When creating slide, they would learn how to use images that are in the public domain and to give credit to the source. If they chose to purchase an image, there would be learning around internet commerce and safety. Effective digital visual design could be a mini-lesson. When sharing their slide show with the class or publishing it to the web, learning around appropriate collaboration and digital communication could occur. One of the aspects of teaching digital literacy that I would like to explore this semester is non-teacher-led lessons, or asynchronous, student accessible lessons. My students need to be able to access effective and engaging learning units from home, not just for digital literacy, but for ALL of their content areas. As their teacher and the one ultimately held responsible for “teaching” them, I need to find a way to motivate the students to seek their own learning and a way to hold them accountable to putting in the effort and time from their “classroom” at home. “We have done better at developing understandings of human rigidities than of human creativities.” (Dervin, 67)
Forgive me while I go “mental” on you! No, not crazy...just metacognitive. I had heard that Brenda Dervin’s From the Mind’s Eye of the User was dense material. Having read the framing question for the blog, I had recalled the course on childhood development I had taken during my credential program and remembered that metacognition is largely the ability to think about one’s thinking. So I began mentally tracking my decisions and preparations. Knowing that the material was a deep read, I decided to print out the chapters because I know I process and retain information better when I underline, highlight, and make notes in the margin. I also decided to watch the YouTube video FIRST so I could get a framework or a summary in advance. I read the article with pen in hand one day intending to re-read it the next day. Last semester we learned from Brain Rules that sleeping on an idea or information helps the brain assimilate it and perform better. I woke up thinking about how I would teach this concept. Of course, my waking thoughts were also tangled with plans for coffee, mowing the lawn, grocery shopping, preparing for summer school, and a friend’s birthday BBQ. As I read, I noticed that I was aware of the level of my own understanding, or sense-making, of the content. I would realize I had not comprehended a sentence and would reread it until it made sense. I found myself trying to recall content I had studied in college in my philosophy courses. Dervin references human nature. “Discontinuity is an assumed constant of nature generally and the human condition specifically.” Dervin also delves into how humans perceive knowledge, or in philosophical terms, reality or truth. “Fundamental to the specific application of sense-making to the study of human use of information and information systems is the way in which information is conceptualized.” I was glad these philosophy courses had provided a context in which to frame her thinking. I recalled the progression, or various schools of thought, on human perception of reality. My memory moved over the basics of Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, and existential phenomenology. Basically, that I have come to understand that while there may be objective truth (or knowledge, for the sake of this article), it is never understood without being processed through a specific individual’s lense and that person’s experience of existence. Along those lines, as I read Dervin’s chapters, I also applied a recent personal experience of knowledge seeking to her ideas. I walked back through the steps I took to “bridge the gap”. I examined how I had defined my gap, or “situation stop”. I pondered how I came up with a strategy to solve my problem. I realized that I had tried to repeat past behaviors to solve my problem, but I had to refine the behavior in order to apply it to this new situation. It was what Dervin describes as being at a specific moment in time-space. Finally, I reviewed the actions I took to arrive at my goal and asked myself if I was satisfied with the process. It was this self-reflection that helped me arrive at how I might approach teaching the concept of sense-making to a high school student. I believe I would begin by actually conducting a micro-moment time-line interview with a brave volunteer for the class to watch. Then I would use the YouTube video I watched as an introduction. Next, hit the content from the chapters. Finally, I would have the students try interviewing each other. In conclusion, how I made sense of this article… Learning is a personal experience. Knowledge MAY exist as an objective truth, but it is never transferred as such. It is constructed by an individual, thus Dervin’s assertion that the study of the human use of information and information systems must be done from the perspective of the actor (person seeking the information) and not the observer. As teachers, understanding this concept is especially important. We must become proficient at helping our students construct knowledge. We need to understand the structures of human thought and behavior, or “rigidities”, and move toward creating knowledge and skill, “human creativities”. Here are three ways to teach various aspects of digital citizenship in a personalized way for the students.
Digital Literacy In my teaching context at Independent Studies, we already have a blend of classroom time (teacher/small group time) and independent learning time. Any given student is in the classroom only 3 to 4 hours per week. Students could be more involved in learning content online. This would allow me to flip my classroom by using web based programs to create content for the students that they can access away from the classroom on their own schedule. Ideally, this content could even be personalized for individual students. Also, students can increase their digital literacy by searching out apps, sites, or programs that keep them interested in the material. I could even have the students fill out a survey about their favorite apps so far (educational or otherwise) and then as the year progresses, expose them to more and as an assignment have them find and use their own favorites. Digital Health and Wellness “ But even beyond the physical aspects, adults need to be aware of the amount and type of technology used by students… digital health and wellness issue...becoming addicted to the Internet or to video games and withdrawing from society” (Ribble). I hear many of my students talking about their gaming. One student spends about an average of 4 to 5 hours a day gaming. I was thinking about how little time that leaves for other activities that should be included in a balanced, healthy lifestyle - exercise, socializing, plenty of sleep. I think it might be a good activity to promote awareness of time usage . Brainstorm on a padlet the student’s ideas about what daily actions and choices keep a person healthy, happy, and form good habits for a lifelong habit of health and wellness. Then have each student log their days and come up with pie charts representing time allotted to various activities each week. Compare the brainstormed list to the ways students are actually spending their time to see how we fare. Digital Communication From reading Luvvie Ajayi’s article “How to Keep Your College Admissions Letter” I got an idea of how to make appropriate digital communication personal to each student. I’ll call it the JumbTron Lesson. Ask students to find a textstream to a friend and take a screenshot of it. Now ask them to post it to a class padlet. Many are likely to object claiming it is too personal or private. It makes the point quickly that nothing is private when posted to the internet or even sent digitally from person to person. Someday, that text stream may be retrieved and used to show your choices and character. Would you want your text streams or your instagram account or your Facebook page on a JumboTron in New York City? Another quickie to try with students to make their internet presence apparent to them is to have them Google themselves and see what comes up. Likely most students have done this already. The person held responsible for making it happen will usually have a different perspective than the people looking in from the outside. So I chuckled at Katie Varatta’s blog, “Teaching in a Competency-Based Education Environment”. Of course the general reaction to the idea of all students passing through their education with mastery of their learning targets is a positive one! As Ms. Varatta says, though, the teachers (where the rubber meets the road, so to speak) ask some very good questions. First, my ponderings and questions… then the ways technology integration might be able to offer solutions. Competency Based Education (CBE) aims to individualize learning targets to each student so he can grow from current understanding (where he is now) through a learning goal. The proposition is that the student is the center of his education and his learning goals are personalized to him. Also, in CBE, the student has choices for demonstrating what they’ve learned - assumably it can be performance tasks, tests, presentations, projects. Ms Varatta ostensibly dealt with the questions from teachers of needing to write multiple lesson plans and managing all the levels. She indicated that multiple lesson plans were not necessary and that logistics would help manage the levels. Admittedly, the answer left me a little dubious. One way I can see technology assisting in the “logistics” is in the most basic elements of tracking of learning goals. Leaving aside my ponderings about who makes the learning targets (are they like standards? State mandated? Truly decided by the student?) and who provides the curriculum for those standards… let’s assume there’s a web-based program where a data base can be accessed and a set of learning goals assigned to each student. Teacher, student, and parents could all have access to facilitate a team effort. The teacher could update the progress, or even better, the student herself could do it, and the parents could have anytime access. Proponents of CBE point out that students pass through learning targets and ideally, would not even be tracked by grade level. Again, leaving aside the massive overhaul of the U.S. system of education that would need to happen to truly achieve this goal, I wanted to examine the idea of mastering one learning goal before progressing to another. One website points out that in the In traditional school settings, students can move through grade levels even if they only understand 60 percent of the material. From my experience, social promotion in the elementary and middle schools means that some students are progressing onto more difficult material with even less of 60% understanding of material. A 5th grade student only understands 55% of the math concepts presented that year, gets to 6th grade, and is expected to begin on gaining proficiency in 6th grade math concepts. The label of being a “5th grader” or a “6th grader” determine what learning goals, or standards, a student will be given to tackle. There is no information other than a final grade from the previous year passed on to the next teacher. The new teacher spends weeks or months just figuring out the gaps in each student’s learning. Technology could help by having a database that tracks individualized learning targets. The information would follow the student and she could pick up where she left off. Realistically, this would also mean that the curriculum, lessons, and some evaluations would be at least partially computer-based. This summer I will be teaching in a credit recovery program (summer school). I will be using a program called APEX. The learning goals, curriculum, quizzes, activities, and exam for a course are all accessible through this self-paced, web-based program. Students only progress to the next unit after having “passed” the previous unit. The administrator for the school site sets the level at which students pass through each unit - in this case 70%. The teacher has access to all the materials and can even modify the requirements for each student individually (ie: include or exclude certain parts or teacher-grade or teacher-pass a section). Students can work as quickly as they want and retake portions until they achieve mastery. I am interested to work with this program to see it in action. It could be a viable option for technology integration for CBE. I chose the Innovative Learning program in large part because I realized that I needed to grow as an educator in the area of technology in education and teaching 21st century learning skills. I began my teaching career in 1995 when “you’ve got mail” and “surfing the worldwide web” were rather new and exciting phrases. Over the two decades I’ve been teaching, I have managed to maintain basic proficiency in the use of technology, but I’ve never gained a deep passion for incorporating technology into learning. I used technology solely as a tool to replace other tools - computer for paper & pen, online research to replace the library, email to replace notes or phone calls. I even felt a resistance due to concerns about possible detriments of our societal shift of reliance upon technology. I believe that fluent reading with deep comprehension is the most essential foundation of all learning. Acquiring this fluency and comprehension is a complex process requiring memorization, attention span, background knowledge and interaction with the physical world, early verbal language, socialization, many hours actually reading, and critical thinking skills. I’ve seen how increased screen time, online research, immediate availability of facts, information overload, and shortcuts taken by students can be detrimental to many of these processes. On the other hand, I also realized that my ignorance in the area of technology infused teaching and learning is stopping me from exploring its best uses. I hoped to become a more informed educator in the area of the efficacious uses of technology in the classroom. I hoped the Innovative Learning program would help me leverage my use of technology to maximize the benefits of technology while minimizing any possible drawbacks to student learning and critical thinking. At this point in the program, I already feel empowered to explore all the used of technology and innovative learning/teaching. I feel more confident in distinguishing between responsible, effective use of tech tools that are intrinsically part of a learning process and those that are simply overlays to a process and aren’t beneficial in and of themselves. I’ve certainly grown in my comfort level of the use of particular tech tools. Just the fact that I can post a blog (not write it, just post it) in under a couple minutes is a noticeable difference from the beginning of the semester. Before this class, I can count on one hand the amount of times I published to the web. (Don’t laugh!) From dinosaur to… dog(gedness) to… dynamo? One can hope!
A proposed answer for the task of improving student motivation is the Flipped Classroom model and implementing Challenge Based Learning.
Go ahead, flip your classroom in your head. Imagine asking a student to go learn something on his own. Give him the topic of the desired lesson, give him some video to watch and some reading to do. Tell him to come prepared to class with either some questions or problems (ie math) already answered on the topic, recorded notes, or a written reflection. How many students will do it? Our collective experience as teachers informs us that there will always be students who come to class without having adequately prepared. That isn’t my point, or even a new concern that would arise from a flipped classroom. It’s just a reality to be handled appropriately by a teacher and student as it occurs. In my imagination, as I flip my classroom, I would expect the immediate motivational effect to be minimal, but the long term motivational effect to be significant. Being motivated often requires a student to be able to imagine the future benefits of an action, to be able to visual the outcome, and to be able to connect in advance to a feeling of accomplishment or pride. Why do I do the dishes, clean the kitchen, pack my lunch, and load up my coffee maker before I go to bed, even when I’m tired from a long day and just want to crawl under the covers? Because I have experience with how good it feels in the morning to wake up to a clean kitchen, the smell of coffee, and not having to pack a lunch in a hurry before heading out the door. At night, even if I don’t have any immediate benefits in front of me (why not wait, after all?), I can visualize the feeling the next morning. And I have enough experience to know that the evenings I chose NOT to do the work, I regretted it the next morning. Motivation! After a few weeks or, for some, a few months of either regret or satisfaction, students’ motivation will likely increase. One of the goals of flipping a classroom is to provide class time that allows the students and teacher the time to engage in more productive “application” of the concept or lesson. This could be troubleshooting issues a student encountered while frontloading the lesson. As Ramsey Musallam said, student curiosity and those questions they bring us are our best friends. Go ahead and embrace the mess! Another more engaging way to use class time is working collaboratively with other students on a project, hands-on activities and experiments, or presentations. From the flipped classroom model, presumably, this use of class time is more enjoyable, effective for learning, and therefore, more motivating. Challenge Based Learning (CBL) is a collaborative experience involving students, teachers, community members, and sometimes parents. It is akin to PBL (project based learning or problem based learning, depending on your era). Students, usually in teams, learn about real world issues, create an essential question, frame a challenge in which they propose solutions to these problems, form an action plan, execute it, and publish their results. Some of the reported additional benefits from a 6 school pilot CBL were as follows:
In investigating flipped classrooms, I see ideas that I can use to improve our model of it. Our students primarily use district-adopted textbooks in their work. We also create mini-projects based on curriculum. This is a rather one dimensional way to learn. We could incorporate more teacher created video lessons and digital collaboration that could enrich study from home during the week, either meant to give the opportunity for feedback to the teacher or for students to collaborate with one another. I started following links from April Tucker’’s site and found several YouTube videos from Jon Bergmann, Aaron Sams (Edutopia), and Katie Gimbar that I felt had useful tips. CBL might be more challenging to implement for a large, long-term project, but, as was stated in a couple of the guides for CBL, an individual teacher or class can actually accomplish a CBL module in as short as a few weeks. I can most easily imagine working a CBL opportunity into my Social Studies framework. One of the connecting ideas to CBL that especially spoke to me was it’s natural inclusion of what was called Personalized Learning and its four key aspects. These 4 descriptors capture what we often call “voice and choice”, and it is very important to my students. As I'm reading the descriptions of the different kinds of data analysis, I am realizing that I don't have a good grasp of the different kinds of analyses. I haven't taken a math course since high school (embarrassing to admit) and never had a statistics class. I know that I will perform two different quantitative analyses and one qualitative analysis. It's possible that there will be more than than. From my understanding of having triangulated data, a study is stronger with both categories of data (mixed method).
The tool I found most understandable and helpful was socsciestatistics.com. I think I will first create two basic, Excel tables to tables. The first table will record each student's weekly minutes read and take an overall average. The second table will be each student's beginning RI score and ending RI score and calculate the increase from pretest to posttest. Each amount will be entered as an interval/ratio into a OneWay ANOVA calculator. I could also try a TwoWay ANOVA if I also enter attitude toward reading as another variable. (I think. ) Another possible calculator is the T Test. I also came up with the possibility of using Pearson's R Calculator or Pearson Correlation Coefficient calculator. I can't tell which of these four to use ( or all). I think that the choice of which test to run will become more clear to me after I finish collecting my data and begin organizing it, constructing tables, and piecing it all together. That's all I got, folks! THE SUMMATIVE TAKE-AWAYS
Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation There is a mismatch between what science knows and businesses practice. Experiments shows that rewards as motivation only work when the task is mechanical, simple, and not requiring cognitive skills or creativity. Typical “If-Then”rewards focus thinking to a single-minded frame, whereas solving problems needs expansive, creative, out-of-the-box thinking. Intrinsic motivation may have better results. This kind of motivation works with three principals: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. An example of autonomous work is Google’s 20% time, where employees work on any project they want. Historically this “free play” time produces about 50% of Google’s new products. Another example of autonomy in work is the ROWE workplace - results only work environment. John Seely Brown - The Culture of Learning in a World of Constant Flux In a world in constant flux, learning will need to amplify curiosity so that we can keep up and create. Understanding is socially constructed, so learning is done effectively in group study. This can be done virtually. Dusty and his cohort of aerial surfers demonstrates that perhaps what is needed is a deep questing disposition. Studying the MMOG World of Warcraft shows that this complex game is a joint collective agency. In both these examples, competitors or gamers are willing to fail, fail, fail in order to hone a craft so they can ultimately master a skill and succeed. In both examples, the task is considered fun all the while learning. Play is, in fact, a key aspect of learning and also of creating or changing a culture. Man is a thinker in three ways: homosapien (man as knower), homofaber (man as maker), and homoludens (man as player). When we utilize all three forms of learning and thinking, we are entering into an activity of deep tinkering. All of these qualities combined can create a new culture of learning for the 21st century. Howard Gardner: Five Minds for the Future All thought, generally speaking, has commonalities, but every academic discipline (history, science, math, arts) has its own mental forms, or required ways of thinking. The five minds can be broken into two categories: cognitive and social.
In the world of education creativity is as important as literacy. Creativity requires the ability to risk being wrong. If you aren’t prepared to make a mistake, you won’t ever come up with anything new. We naturally possess creativity as children and seem to be educated out of it. We are taught NOT to make mistakes. Our entire 19th century education system is designed to meet the needs of the industrial revolution. In design it is a protracted process of getting to the university level. It values a hierarchy of subject material with math and language at the top and the arts at the bottom. It does not necessarily honor what we now know about intelligence - that intelligence is diverse, dynamic, and distinct. This system is not working for the 21st century and will not serve us well for the future. THE COMMENTARY Most of these video presentations were eight to ten years ago. They all emphasize how technology and innovation is driving knowledge and skills to grow exponentially and that what we teach today may be obsolete within years. Given this fact, it is heartening to see that these video presentations themselves are still relevant. I say it is heartening because the thinking around education seems to have evolved to guiding principles that will be able to steer us through the unpredictability of the technology age. NVUSD’s 4C’s goals of 21st century learning: critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration,and a fifth goal often mentioned in our reading on 21st century learning, global citizenship, are mentioned in all of the videos. Gardner’s five minds list is almost a direct reiteration of these goals, although it is probably more accurate to say that Gardner is partly responsible for the existence of the 4 C’s learning goals. John Seely Brown emphasizes collaborative learning and playing, or creativity. Dan Pink and Sir Ken Robinson also emphasize the need to exercise creative thinking in order to address the needs for the future. What I find so fascinating about these “new” goals for education is that none of them is actually particularly new. All of these qualities, either singly or collectively, have existed in humanity for centuries or even millenniums. It is actually because humans have the ability to be creative, think critically, communicate, and collaborate that we are where we are today - in the midst of an age of discovery, invention, and flux. The Renaissance had much of the same characteristics as this period in time and the Industrial Revolution itself was a result of increases in ingenuity in business. Humans have always been inventing, problem solving, and creating in order to help ourselves. It’s almost as if we are seeing the need to re-emphasize these human qualities for this next phase in history because our education system (at least in the U.S.) has devalued them in an educational system that was designed by the universities and the US Labor Department to fit the needs of the Industrial Revolution. There is one learning goal for a 21st education that I feel should be considered. It is hinted at in Gardner’s Respectful and Ethical Minds, in Seely Brown’s notion of a deep questing disposition, and when Sir Robinson bemoans that the arts are at the bottom of the hierarchy of education worldwide. I’ll come at it from the content of Louis R. Mobley’s philosophy for his IBM executive training philosophy that is outlined in the Forbes article “Can Creativity Be Taught?” The fifth principle comes from Mobley’s discovery “that creativity is highly correlated with self-knowledge. It is impossible to overcome biases if we don’t know they are there, and Mobley’s school was designed to be one big mirror.” Acquiring self-knowledge should be a learning goal. By self-knowledge I do not mean naval-gazing, being self-centered, or figuring out what I want in life. I mean something closer to what Gardner mentioned when he spoke of having an abstract view of yourself in connection to your context - your family, your school, your community, your country, your world. To this should be added, I believe, being connected to your historical context as a member of humanity. We should remember that we can’t experiment, innovate, create, nor play our own history as the human race but we certainly shouldn’t ignore it. We would be prudent to study it, understand it, connect to it, communicate it - all so that we can glean the best from human achievement and avoid the colossal mistakes made. If you want to do away with your own biases, study humanity’s worst transgressions to know what we are capable of perpetrating. With Sir Ken, I wish for a return on an emphasis of studying the humanities and arts so that we do not lose understanding of a rich history of philosophy, political science, literature, music, art, and drama. Within these academic disciplines is a whole history of thought, experience, perspective, and expression that can aid us on a quest for self-knowledge and help us form ethical minds. Another 21st century learning model buzz word or catch phrase that I ponder and observe is the call to prepare our students for the “global economy”. If our 19th century educational model failed when the economy for which it was designed began to change (the Industrial Age), does that mean that we are currently making a similar mistake by trying to design an educational system to meet THIS present and predicted economy and it, too, will fail when this economy changes? Is education about creating producers and consumers for an economy? I throw out the consideration that economic ends are certainly pragmatic and necessary, but education should be about creating thinking people who have studied and have at least tried to understand the nature of the universe and the nature of humankind so that they will always be prepared to handle whatever either (the universe or humankind) throws at them. |
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December 2017
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